by Mark Zuckerberghttps://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631
Note the use here of adjectives and adverbs: “direct,” “blanket,” “carefully,” etc, etc. I take it for granted that every electronic communication I send may be read by some agent of the Secret State. I also take it for granted that Mr Zuckerberg knows which side his bread is buttered. SIG Continue reading →

Media accounts claim that the latest non-government cyber-Armageddon — a Distributed Denial of Service attack on anti-spam service SpamHaus by unidentified attackers alleged by some to be acting on behalf of “pretty much anything goes” web host CyberBunker — reached such proportions that it may have actually slowed down the Internet in general. As I write this article, the attack on SpamHaus appears to have ended in failure, but CyberBunker itself has been taken down in (direct or indirect, who knows) retribution. Continue reading →

Note: There may be something in what Richard says. The car part scam is certainly true. A bulb went in my front light a few weeks ago, and I am facing a bill for hundreds to replace the whole light unit when I finally get the service done. It is almost impossible to buy third party spares for cars or gas boilers; and, once you have paid a fortune for something, you are locked into an increasingly expensive cycle of repairs. However, planned obsolescence claims for appliances as a whole have been around for a long time, and are mostly based on a misunderstanding of market forces and technological progress. Consider:

1. There doesn’t need to be anything like perfect competition for manufacturers to compete on price and quality. If one manufacturer sells products that are designed to die within a year, people will tend to switch to better products. For example, I bought a Toshiba notebook computer in 2004. Just outside the warranty period, something called the fl inverter died, and I had to choose between an expensive repair and replacement. In fact, one of my clients gave me a new Toshiba notebook. Eighteen months later, I had the same problem. Since then, I have avoided anything made by Toshiba. If this was a ploy to increase sales for Toshiba, it didn’t work in my case.

2. In many cases, it is sensible for products not to be made with durability in mind. I bought my first notebook computer in 1992. It had 1Mb of RAM and a 20Mb hard drive, and a 286 processor. Would I really want it still to be in working order? How about the Kodak digital camera I bought in 2001, with its c250Kp resolution? No. Let such products be made to work well until they become useless to do what people want of them. The same is true of the music system I bought in 1988. I might add that things like digital cameras and mobile telephones easily outlast their usable lives. Every year, I give things away that are still in perfect working order, but that I regard as obsolete. Also, many people are highly conscious of fashion. They want to replace appliances for purely aesthetic reasons. When such people comprise enough of the customer base, there is no good reason for those appliances to be made to last forever.

3. Over the past twenty years, the prices of most electrical products have fallen sharply in both real and nominal terms. This is partly due to improvements in manufacturing and distribution technology, and partly to cost cutting. If you want a pair of headphones to last as well as they did in the 1980s, you only need to pay roughly what you did in the 1980s. Mrs Gabb and I spent £1,000 on a Sony widescreen television in 2000. It is still working as well as on the day I took it from the box.

4. When even electronic products are mature, and there is no reason to keep upgrading, durability does seem here to be a standard feature. For example, I bought an HP Laserjet 1100 in 1999. It had a design fault that made it malfunction in 2000. HP sent me a piece of cardboard to shove into the paper feed. That sorted the problem, and the printer is still working today. It still does exactly what I bought it to do, which was to produce high quality black and white text on one side of the paper. Oh, and the toner cartridges have come down in price from £c60 to £c6.

I suppose the summarised case is that, if you want it to last longer than three years, you should consider paying more than £250 for a fridge-freezer. SIGContinue reading →

Mrs Gabb bought me a Soundlogik USB turntable for my birthday – £22.50 from The Factory Shop. I was prepared to be disappointed. However, it digitises old records as well as I’ve ever heard them play. Indeed, a capture of The Nelson Mass from 1979 sounds about as good as the CD version, allowing, of course, for surface noise. If I fiddle about with changing the needle, it will also do 78rpm records. I think we’ve now reached the point where cheapo stuff is about as good as the more expensive. I will, in due course, upload some of the captures.

Suggestions for inclusion may be submitted to the above e-mail address. One high priority document has not been located. Between the end of WW II and 1950 Naval Intelligence created a classified archaeology report about prior civilizations on the North American Continent. Talk to your family members who served during WW II and Korea to determine the title and author of the document. I suspect it contains maps that we need.

Introduction

Activating this Post Apocalypse Recovery Project begins an effort which there is no documented evidence has ever been done before in all of human history. The purpose is to manage information, knowledge and resources to minimize the intentional disruption of social stability caused by the engineered collapse of civilization and minimize the recovery time to develop new stable social processes among the survivors. There will be survivors. Continue reading →

I am going to tell you some stories. To make it interesting, I will begin with one which could make one of my readers the deal of a lifetime. It ends on September 30. He who hesitates is lost.

I begin with the obvious: the falling cost of Internet communications is revolutionizing the spread of knowledge. In doing so, it is undermining every establishment. Every establishment rests much of its power on official views of the past. This is seen in the novel by George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The tyrant who enforces the totalitarian state says this. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The cost of controlling the past has risen exponentially since 1995: the year that the graphics browser was introduced. Then came Google.

I know Orwell said this, because I just verified it on several websites. That took under one minute. There is some debate over punctuation: period, colon, or semicolon. I think I will not go to the trouble of looking it up in my library, which is in a special room miles away. Continue reading →